Riots For
A suggestion about the source of blue check disgust over the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse.
In the long Ferguson moment, students protested at colleges and universities all over the country. They were protesting against the racism of their own institutions and the people who ran them. At Amherst College, for example, the student-led Amherst Uprising demanded an end to that college’s patterns of “racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, ableism, classism and the stigmatization of mental health.” Simply put, the students were no longer going to tolerate the bigotry of the people who ran their schools and their society.
But a funny thing kept happening to the protests against colleges and universities: the colleges and universities kept embracing and celebrating a student-led movement that was attacking the institutions. In the 1960s, the fuddy old college president called the police when you occupied the campus library, or the mean old governor called you a beatnik; fifty years later, the college president did this:
Imagine how hard it sucks when you keep trying to Smash Fash, but the fascists keep showing up and rubbing against your leg like an amorous housecat. At the University of Missouri in 2015, a black grad student announced that he was going on a hunger strike until he was dead or until the racist president of the oppressive state university system resigned; faculty and staff promptly rallied to the support of the people “protesting against” their institution, leading to the infamous moment in which a professor — of communications, natch — shouted that she needed some muscle to deal with an improperly non-fawning student journalist who tried to approach the hunger striker and his supporters.
People inside institutions embraced “protests against” the institutions they led and served because the protests against weren’t protests against; rather, they were protests that aligned with the values, the status signals, and the rice bowls of institutional leaders. Students who absolutely demanded that universities hire more diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators — our fists are in your face, fascists! — found that, guess what, academic administrators were willing to give in to the demand to hire more academic administrators. “Coal miner union submits to demands for more coal miners to be hired, news at 11:00.”
Protesters demanded that colleges and universities do things that colleges and universities already wanted to do, so colleges and universities gave in to them. To a significant degree, protests and sit-ins and hunger strikes gave academic careerists cover to go where they meant to go; the desires of the people being targeted by the protests were aligned with the demands of the people “protesting against” them. Cf. Evergreen College, for crying out loud.
Today, as governments ratchet systems of personal control into place — vaccine mandates, mask requirements, increasingly aggressive and persistent lockdown rules — people who protest the growing authority of government risk being attacked by Antifa. The anti-fascists won’t tolerate Nazi extremists who try to….limit the power of government. This is a real news headline:
The fascists, the Nazis, the far-right extremists, the authoritarians are the people opposing the expansion of government power; the anti-fascists appreciate the coordination between the executive branch of the central government and the private corporations, because vaccine mandates keep us safe. I think we all remember how Mussolini was desperate to reduce the power of the state, right?
Now comes the moment when only fascists talk about the importance of due process:
It’s the same inversion as the Ferguson moment, the “protests against” that function as protests for, as protests on behalf of. Anti-fascists mask up and fight for more aggressive government mandates; people who posture against the institutions of power are the street army of institutional power. Fuck the fascists by eliminating due process, they chanted, enraging the authoritarians. Speaking truth to power, protesters follow a United States senator into the bathroom, demanding more funding for central government. Take that!
Our governments are racist and fascist, and we’re going to fight against them until they….grow.
So the bizarre moments last summer in which news media played down and walked away from the images of cities burning….
…strike me as signs of affinity and alignment: they were mostly peaceful because they were mostly acceptable to the people calling them peaceful. The “protesters against” were protesters for the things that the human centipede of elite striving wants. They were on the same side.
Kyle Rittenhouse shot their allies.
If only we could get some real antivaccists rioting in the streets against Faucism. Kind of like in Rotterdam right now, maybe... looking forward to seeing how they spin that over here.
Antifa is quite a phenomenon. You don't have to read too far between the lines to see their FBI handlers and Soros funding. Andy Ngo's work is a good starting place: https://thepostmillennial.com/author/andyngo
Very well said. I gave up trying to point out to leftists on Twatter that there is something amiss when, say, the very elites who wield institutional power in America enthusiastically endorse quack-Dr Ibram Kendi and pay him extravagant sums to proclaim that their institutions are hopelessly and irredeemably racist, almost like he is spreading a message those elites like and find useful. The responses I received from Kendi's disciples made me think that the concept of "NPC" really does signify a deeper reality. Somehow a large number of people are convinced that wealthy and powerful white people are lifting up poor and marginalized minorities, while working-poor whites are the ones holding them down.
I don't know which is worse: that everything seems to be precisely backwards in this clown world, or that the elites have so many useful idiots willing to do their dirty work for them. In Animal Farm, which is worst, the pigs or the sheep or the dogs? God willing, there are enough people like Benjamin the Donkey who can come together and oppose the pigs successfully. I would like to be optimistic, but it is hard. Thanks so much for writing this substack. I can't tell you what a blessing it is to find people like you who are willing to defy the party and acknowledge that 2 plus 2 really does equal 4.